After I left urban life, 14 years ago, in which I fully engaged in the play that urban life can offer, I did, indeed, find the different beauty of “taoist surfing” in my wanderings amongst the meadows, hills, rivers and valleys of the rural life I ultimately chose

Though I loved the privileges that my education, experience and professional status offered, I found myself wanting something . . . something more beyond the cement high-rises and pedestrian asphalt that position and prestige had given me. I lived in the City with all of it’s strengths and class divisions, inside of which I had risen. Though I loved the status it had given me, I most often found myself loading my bicycle onto my car and driving out into the wilderness to experience myself truly, outside of the constructed, contrived parameters of position and power that my station afforded me.

I really wanted nothing more than to tour remote places on two wheels at a slow pace.

After years of stating this to my friends and colleagues of similar social/professional stations who, finally said, “Yeah, Amelia, we’ll believe it when we see it . . . ”

I finally did. I walked out completely and totally . . . and found and began to live my true heart’s desire.

I met a woman this morning with whom I had a very long, interesting conversation – the kind that drifts in and around and through many subjects, has no boundaries regarding strict schedules and no need to rush off somewhere else and which leaves us with an internal sense of renewed creativity and curiosity about our own small worlds. Such talks inspire our positive sense of light and excitement and an expanded state of possibilities.

This is why I don’t spend much time with busy, “heavily-scheduled” people. Their busyness is, ultimately, a bore, engaged in by superficial boors. I’d rather spend time with something and/or someone outside of time constraints, a bit nutty and allowing for things to naturally unfold, just like this woman and the man (the fabulous Jackie Chan, master of both the ridiculously slapstick and the beautiful martial artistry of life) here in the photo. These are my people.

There are many meditation practices that have been introduced to the West, primarily Buddhist and Hindu, that teach that our goal in this lifetime (or any, if you believe in reincarnation), is to transcend the human, physical experience of life. Many of these philosophies focus on emptying the mind of all thoughts and experiencing the place of nothingness and non-existence.

Such practices are very useful in allowing the aspiring seeker of their own spirituality to enter into a state of comprehension that infinite awareness falls outside of the small and temporal cardboard box within which we have incarnated at any given time. I have, indeed, sat for many years in the tibetan buddhist tradition and have gained enormous insights into the infinity of awareness.

I have always found such practices to be wonderful complements to the moving meditation of the Tao.

The Taoist arts, however, also have a sitting meditation practice, the foundation of which is very different from the above-mentioned practices. Read the rest of this entry »